Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
MAHAWEEL, Iraq - The killers kept bankers' hours.
They showed up for work at the barley field at 9 a.m., trailed by backhoes and three buses filled with blindfolded men, women and children as young as 1.
Every day, witnesses say, the routine was the same: The backhoes dug a trench; 50 people were led to the edge of the hole and shot, one by one, in the head; the backhoes covered them with dirt, then dug another hole for the next group.
At 5 p.m., the killers - officials of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party - went home to rest up for another day of slaughter.
In this wind-swept field in the central town of Mahaweel, witnesses say, this went on without a break for 35 days in March and April 1991, during a crackdown on a Shiite Muslim uprising that followed the Persian Gulf War.
"I watched this with my own eyes," said Sayed Abbas Muhsen, 35, whose family farm was appropriated by Hussein's government for use as a killing field. "But we couldn't tell anyone. We didn't dare."
The mass grave at Mahaweel, with more than 3,100 sets of remains, is the largest of some 270 such sites across Iraq. They hold upward of 300,000 bodies; some Iraqi political parties estimate there are more than 1-million.
"It's as easy to find mass graves in Iraq as it once was to find oil," said Adnan Jabbar al-Saadi, a lawyer with Iraq's new Human Rights Ministry.
In the days following Hussein's fall on April 9, family members rushed to grave sites, digging for ID cards and clothing.
The U.S.-led occupation authority desperately tried to halt the digging, telling people that if they waited, forensic teams would unearth the remains and use the evidence to punish those responsible.
Now, an Associated Press investigation has discovered, forensic teams will begin digging in January to preserve the first physical evidence at four grave sites, their desert locations kept secret to prevent relatives from disturbing them first.
Excavating a grave site under international standards is painstaking work. To pull 100 sets of remains from the ground, it usually takes six to eight weeks.
Nobody expects scientists to dig up and identify 300,000 sets of remains. So as the scientists analyze the desert, experts are trying to identify which graves could help prosecutors build a case against those responsible for their creation.
"We're trying to make sure that there is at least one grave, and hopefully two or three, for each major period of atrocity," said Sandra Hodgkinson, director of the occupation authority's human rights office. That would mean eight to 24 mass graves selected for full exhumation.
Meanwhile, Iraqis will unearth graves with an eye toward identification. Entifadh Qanbar, spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress, a major political party, said that will help Iraqis move on from three decades of dictatorship.